Textile printing equipment nowadays both domestically and internationally is mainly of mechanical type which features in lower automation and lower productivity. Taking the flat screen printing machine and the rotary screen printing machine which represent main stream machines in the present market as an example, they have three major shortcomings: firstly consuming a great volume of fresh water and draining a large volume of polluted water which heavily consume resource and badly pollute environment; secondly printing patterns implemented only through printing screens having one color for each, thus resulting in a long periodic technical process with drawbacks of less color range, high cost of screen making, heavy pollution in screen washing; and thirdly featuring in lower level of automation and intellectualization, heavy intensity of labor and lower productivity.
The intelligent printing and dyeing equipment has become a hotspot topic of R & D worldwide in recent years and among which the most representative one is the ink-jet printing machine. The equipment makes use of its computer software system to print the stored printing pattern design onto the pretreated textiles via its ink-jet printing machine and then fix up the color through steaming, wash off the loose color to complete the whole process. But this technique is still not ready to be put into industrial production because of its rather high cost, lower output speed, and some problem, in key links of technology, such as nozzles and dyes and environmental protection. So the world is waiting for a break-through in industrialized, on-scale and continuous intelligent waterless printing on textiles at present stage.